Running Memtest On Linux

Many of you will be familiar with memtest utility.MemTest is a RAM tester that verifies that your computer can store and retrieve data from memory without any error. A computer may fail in these tests because of old hardware, damaged hardware, or poorly configured hardware and it will be less stable and crash more often. Even worse, corrupted data is written to your hard disk which may create further problems. By running MemTest you can ensure that your computer’s RAM is correctly functioning.

Now let’s see how we can use it on a Linux machine. As you know I use RHEL so here I have demonstrated the installation on a RHEL machine.Memtest package is provided with the RHEL software package and all you need is to issue yum install memtest to install it.Now from the terminal issue memtest-setup command.This will configure your grub.conf file to add memtest in its menu.

Now to see it in action just restart your machine and press e when you get a prompt stating press any key to continue.Here you will see an added entry besides your kernel. Just select it and continue booting and you’ll see memtest screen as shown in the screenshot above.